County forgets to include cabling when building new jail

A new justice center is being built in Houston County, Minnesota without the cabling necessary for in-building wireless communication. According to reporting from the Spring Grove Herald, county commissioners railed against the consultant who apparently forgot to include an in-building distributed antenna system (DAS) in the construction plan. In a plight that is too familiar to many in the cabling industry, the system was tacked onto the contract at the last minute but rejected.

The $101,247 bid from Cellular Specialties Inc. was met with scorn from some of the commissioners. As The Herald's writer Craig Moorhead noted, Houston County Commission Chairman Jack Miller said, "We seem to be spending money on every whim and want, and enough is enough. There is a cheaper way to communicate when you're in that building." Smith suggested the use of handheld walkie-talkie style communication.

It sounds like Miller's biggest beef is with the consultant who overlooked the DAS: "We're paying half a million dollars, practically, to a consultant, and at the last minute we come up with this ..." he is quoted as saying.

Another commissioner's comments make me think that someday we'll hear about the $350,000 brownfield DAS installation at the Houston County, Minnesota Justice Center. "It wasn't budgeted," said commissioner Tom Bjerke. "If we delay this, we could always put it in later."

Or maybe not. After all, there are far more economical options than an in-building distributed antenna system.

Not to say I told you so, but ...

Remember that rant I went on about how a "just-for-fun" contest, looking for the biggest cabling mess around, could really be a setup for a movement to rid the world of as many cables as possible? If you don't remember it, or just can't wait to read it again, here it is.

Well, today I found a blog post from Cisco Systems' J Metz, a product manager for FCoE. The post's title: FCoE Cabling - Before and After. Take a look.

Crazy Cabling Contest more than it appears?

First Black Box launched a makeover contest for messy racks and telecommunications rooms, the winner of which will receive $20k in equipment and installation services. That contest appears to be going well. Last I heard there were 100 or so entries. Black Box has determined the five finalists and anyone can vote to decide the winner.

Today I learned about another, similar contest sponsored by none other than Cisco Systems. It's called the Crazy Cabling Contest (go ahead and click to find out all about it). Like Black Box, Cisco is looking for photos of the worst abominations of telecom rooms. "Send us a photo of your data center in all its crazy, twisty and windy glory and you could win big!" they say. The top three photos, as judged by popular vote, each will win a Flip Mino HD 120 camera. The top winner will also receive a $200 Amazon gift card with second- and third-place entries receiving $100 and $50 Amazon gift cards, respectively.

So if you've already missed out on Black Box's $20,000 prize package, you still have a chance to win something.

In its promotion of the Crazy Cabling Contest, Cisco says it doesn't plan to disclose the name of anyone submitting a photo, nor the location at which the photo was taken. "This is strictly for fun," they say. OK but, well ... it's not that I don't completely believe them when they say it's only for fun. It's just that, I maybe kind of don't completely believe them. I read the contest's official rules. OK, maybe not all five pages of them, but I read until I found what I was looking for. Basically, once you submit a photo for this contest, they can do anything they want with it. Here's how they officially say that.

By Submitting Photo(s), Participant irrevocably grants Sponsor and its affiliates, legal representatives, assigns, agents and licensees, the unconditional, irrevocable and perpetual right and permission, royalty-free, to reproduce, encode, store, copy, transmit, publish, post, broadcast, display, publicly perform, adapt, exhibit and/or otherwise use or reuse (without limitation as to when or to the number of times used), for any purpose, the Participant's Photo(s) and ideas and materials contained therein ...

It goes on much longer than that. And it all sounds like pretty run-of-the-mill legal stuff. I'm sure it is. But am I the only one who will not be surprised if and when a Cisco campaign disparages cables as cumbersome and a necessary evil, using one or more of these contest photos as evidence? Further, I suspect that such a campaign would only be created to promote a technology solution that allows you to rid your network of those dreaded cables, making them an unnecessary evil.

Remember IBM's "Out With Cables, In With Blades" advertising campaign, which essentially depicted the essence of our industry as a menace to data networking? When I would see that commercial during a National Football League game, for example, I'd wonder what kind of an impression it made on the millions of NFL fans who don't know anything about cabling.

And remember the word "adapt" from that legal disclaimer? Photos of cabling messes could be altered to look even worse than they really are. Imagine such a commercial from Cisco airing during a Green Bay-Chicago game in the fall.

Almost makes me want the lockout to happen. Almost.

Taking on a myth about IP convergence and cabling

In his latest blog post, CommScope Enterprise Solutions' director of channel development and training James Donovan addresses what he calls "a myth in the infrastucture market" concerning IP convergence and structured cabling.

The myth, he says, is that one of IP convergence's prime benefits is the need for less cabling. The post encourages network managers to focus on convergence's other benefits because the "fewer cables" mantra could leave them short of the infrastructure support their networks will need.

"IP applications mean a 'single type of cable,' but not necessarily a 'single cable,'" Donovan advises.

You can read his entire blog post here.

Social Security is more messed up than you think

As a Generation Xer who cynically believes that each year I get farther away from retirement rather than closer to it, I long ago gave up on the notion that I will ever receive a Social Security payment from the United States government. In that vein, recently I began watching the Frontline episode entitled Can You Afford to Retire? Even though it was produced before the global economic meltdown of 2008, the program seemed to do a prescient job of offering gloom-and-doom to Baby Boomers and the generations that follow them.

I say "seemed to do" because I was unable to stay awake for the show's entirety. I'm thankful that my three children exhaust me to the point of collapse on a regular basis because, had I mustered the energy to watch the rest of that Frontline episode, I bet I would have been unable to sleep afterward.

Before this turns into a political rant, which is not what you came here for, I told the above story because even if I did have a high level of confidence in our country's Social Security Administration (SSA), that optimism would have been dashed after reading some of the testimony recently given to a joint Congressional subcommittee concerning the state of the SSA's data center.

In early February the SSA's deputy commissioner of systems Kelly Croft described the unsightly scene beneath the raised floor of the administration's National Computer Center (NCC).

After explaining that it may soon be impossible to find replacement parts for the NCC's custom-made uninterruptible power supply, Croft said, "We face even more fundamental problems at the NCC, such as tangled and overcrowded telecommunications and electrical cables beneath the data center floor. Tangled cables can block the underfloor airflow that cools our servers, and we cannot work on the cables safely without shutting down the affected systems.

"Similarly," he noted, "troubleshooting problems is difficult when we cannot isolate cable pairs easily to determine whether the problems exist in the cables or in the IT equipment. There is also an elevated risk of data corruption, because electromagnetic interference from the electrical wires that are located too close to the telecommunications wires can distort data transmission."

Plans for the SSA's new data center apparently are already pretty far behind schedule. Even though I'm not expecting a Social Security payment anytime in the future, I'm concerned for those receiving payments today and the state of the information systems that, if they crashed, I have to believe would put those payments in peril at least temporarily.

I think it'd be worthwhile to alert my Congressional representatives to the sad condition of the SSA's data center, as well as the potential ramifications of an outage of any duration. Maybe you'll consider doing the same.

Dissing fiber? Me?

Recently I had the opportunity to break bread with a handful of professionals who are fully immersed in the business of fiber-optic cabling systems for local area networks. (Read: A vendor that sells fiber systems took me out to lunch.) As the conversation wound down and we were all about to be late for our next appointments, a member of the group offered me an, "Oh, by the way ..." message. It was from another member of the organization who was unable to be present at the meeting, although I now wonder if it was one of those thinly veiled questions asked on behalf of "a friend." Regardless, the message was that this friend was taken aback by the scant few mentions of fiber-optic technologies I included when I assessed the 10 most compelling cabling stories of last year.

At that moment, I was taken aback by the observation. What? I'm being accused of dissing fiber? Couldn't be. But then I mentally scanned through the stories I chose as the biggest of 2010, and the focuses of those stories. Price of copper? Check. 10GBase-T? Check. Increasing the density of the RJ-45? Check? Wireless? Check!

I guess maybe there was some justification for the feeling of disrespect among those who advocate the use of fiber-optic systems, and do so because of their genuine faith in the medium's superiority over other options.

In all fairness, fiber did make its way onto the list in a couple ways. The OM4 standard was mentioned, as were the fiber-rich outside-plant cabling projects taking place with funding from the Broadband Stimulus Act.

But it was the final item on that top-10 list where I apparently did a good job of hiding fiber-optic cabling. I rolled up a number of items under the heading "continuous improvement." The reason I chose that theme as one of last year's top stories is that virtually anytime we posted on our Web site information about a practical resource relating to fiber optics, it was eagerly consumed. By "resource," I mean a reference to a fiber-optic text book or training. The single-page poster on fiber safety produced by The Fiber Optic Association was a particularly big hit. In that sense, fiber was among the most popular topics of 2010.

My hypothesis is that fiber-optic cable as a medium is a stable technology. Its users don't have to "plug and pray" that it will work. So you don't see dozens of articles along the lines of "How to make sure your fiber-optic cabling system will successfully transmit 10-Gbit Ethernet." Looking at the hands-on installation of fiber is where it gets more interesting. I believe many installers are paying more attention to fiber than they had before. For some, perhaps for the first time. Based not on scientific polling but rather on a "finger-in-the-air" approach, I believe that many contracting firms used to have one or more fiber-optic installation specialists on staff. Many of these specialist positions were cut once the economic collapse of 2008 took hold. And now the situation is an example of the jobless recovery we're experiencing. Professionals with fiber-optic installation expertise are not being hired back, and now that - dare I say it? - demand for fiber systems is picking up, installers and technicians with lots of experience in copper cabling but little if any in fiber cabling are looking for all the information they can get.

What I'd really like to hear is your experience from the real world. How close to reality is my assessment?

Guest Blog: Good start to BIMMF debate, but it may be prudent to wait

by Eric Leichter, manager of training and technology, CommScope

I appreciate the balanced view that an industry publication like Cabling Installation & Maintenance offers by providing two sides of the bend-insensitive multimode fiber (BIMMF) story. In its January issue, the magazine published two articles that provide opposing viewpoints on this topic. The first article, Compatibility issues with bend-insensitive and standard multimode, warned that a higher connection loss could be seen when matching legacy and BIMMF. The second article, The facts about BIMMF, did not disagree with this claim, stating, "... differences in designs in BIMMF result in differnces in performance." The article went on to describe the deficiencies in some of these designs. After reading and digesting both, a key takeaway for me was that there is no standard that can make a user of these technologies certain of what performance to expect.

Both TIA and IEC have formed working groups to further investigate this new technology; however, it may take some time for the industry to properly define the performance characteristics of a "standard" BIMMF and to develp the new test procedures that will likely be required. Today's test procedures were developed for a traditional graded-index profile fiber and may not be relevant for fibers with a trench profile. "Testing" can include factory testing by the manufacturer (i.e. core diamter, numerical aperture or bandwidth) or testing in the field by an installer (i.e. source, type of patch cord fiber and mandrel to use). Beyond the unknown timing of BIMMF standards, it is also not possible to say now which, if any, of the available BIMMFs will be compliant to a new standard.

It may be best simply to continue to focus on system performance, as high bandwidth and low bit error rates are the keys to high data throughput. For this, we already have standards-based OM3 and OM4 fibers that provide 100G performance. Today, there's no real need to look any further.

CommScope has authored two white papers that explore the issue in further depth. You can access one white paper here and the other one here.

Eric Leichter, CommScope's manager of training and technology, also blogs on CommScope's website. You can see his CommScope blog here.